Characters: Shinji, Aizen
Summary: "Were you perhaps a lawyer in your past life?"
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for Turn Back the Pendulum arc
Timeline: Turn Back the Pendulum arc
Author's Note: I know I'm not the only one who's compared Aizen to a lawyer.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.

From his desk, Shinji shot a somewhat irritated glare at his lieutenant, propping his sharp chin on the knuckles of long fingers. The urge to tap the desk with his other hand was almost overwhelming.

After witnessing Aizen talk one of his comrades out of a difficult situation yet again, Shinji couldn't help but profess himself a little concerned at how easily negotiation seemed to come to Aizen. In anyone else he would have thought this to be a good thing, but considering this was Aizen, Shinji couldn't help but be at least a little paranoid.

He had a compelling voice. When Aizen spoke, others listened, and almost inevitably they complied with whatever opinion or idea it was he held. People fell in line in front of him, like marbles being dropped in a slot. It was almost preternatural. Aizen had a natural charisma that made everything he proposed sound appealing to everyone who listened.

Almost everyone.

"Sousuke," Shinji's tone was especially acid, "Were you perhaps a lawyer in your past life?"

Standing at attention with his hands behind his back, the young lieutenant only smiled and held back the suspicion of an amused laugh—Shinji meanwhile was trying not to roll his eyes at the display. "No sir; I was only fourteen when I came to be in Soul Society. What makes you think that I was?"

Shinji scowled at this. Aizen looked exactly the way he did now as when Shinji found him somewhere where he shouldn't have been—sometimes innocent places but more often considerably less than innocent—and Aizen calmly and deftly extricated himself from any sticky situation. If anything could have been made to stick to Aizen, anything at all, even the slightest charge, Shinji would have felt much better, to know that Aizen wasn't completely untouchable.

"You talk like a lawyer," Shinji told him flatly. "You're very…articulate, Sousuke."

Aizen nodded, deferent. "Thank you, Hirako-taicho."

Shinji eyed him coolly. "I hate lawyers."

To this Aizen seemed to feign shock. "Why, Hirako-taicho?"

He shrugged. "I have my reasons—you don't have to know everything, Sousuke." He waved him off with one hand. "You're dismissed; go back to whatever it is you were doing?"

Aizen bowed and left, still carrying that air of secretive amusement with him.

And Shinji went to glaring out the window again, eyes staring into the golden afternoon.

If only he could place his finger on whatever it was about Aizen that made him so suspicious. There was the meticulous politeness, that never seemed forced but was never quite real, either. There was the fact that the boy always seemed to know more than what he let on, the knowing gleam in his eyes behind all the bland niceness.

Too nice, too polite, too respectful. And he always turned up in the strangest of places, with absolutely no excuse on hand for why he was there, though he always managed to extract himself from trouble, no matter where he ended up.

Shinji had caught Aizen in lies, too. Always little lies, never big ones. Lies that shouldn't have mattered, except that they did—lies about where he had been the night before, or why his share of the paperwork wasn't done on time, lies about what part of Rukongai he was going to and when. Lies that kept piling up, lies that weren't cohesive and meant nothing.

And none of this amounted to anything Shinji could use. Nothing that let him think that maybe this was more than just his paranoia and Sakanade talking to him. He had to believe that there was more, but he just had no proof. Shinji knows that anyone else he confides in, from Yamamoto to Hiyori, will just tell him that he's crazy, but Shinji knows. He always knows.

Knows there's something wrong about that boy.

Just like a lawyer; Sousuke was probably lying about that, too, when he said he hadn't been one.

Just like a lawyer. Just as silver-tongued, just as slippery, just as dirty.

And like a lawyer, nothing sticks to Aizen Sousuke.